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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28053534">Another World, Tangent to Our Own</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorarycassowary/pseuds/honorarycassowary'>honorarycassowary</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Parahumans Series - Wildbow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Epistolary, Gen, POV Outsider, Worldbuilding, in-universe media, interdimensional politics</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:15:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,822</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28053534</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorarycassowary/pseuds/honorarycassowary</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the early morning of August 5th, 1987, the sky above Wapakoneta, Ohio split open, creating a permanent portal between Earth Aleph and Earth Bet. It has never resealed, binding the two dimensions together even as their histories have diverged.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Another World, Tangent to Our Own</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This piece was originally written for the Parahumans Zine. A full copy of the project (thirty-six pieces of fic and art, plus fancy formatting) can be downloaded <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1VQ9T7PBrkVZ719EmiaXMA6pZgzgl1K9GTmOxsEXLgBY/viewform?edit_requested=true">here</a>. The title is taken from Dick Allen's poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=31421">Theory of the Alternate Universe</a>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>In the early morning of August 5th, 1987, the sky above Wapakoneta, Ohio split open. It has never resealed.</p>
  <p>Even at the time, the <em>how</em> and <em>why</em> were not a mystery; Professor Haywire, the type specimen for the villainous form of the Tinker classification of parahumans, claimed responsibility immediately. His stated motive was to unify the disparate dimension he had identified into a single entity, under the belief that this would allow the collective inhabitants to access heretofore unrealized amounts of energy. Whether Haywire’s claims as to his motivation were truthful has been a subject of intense debate since the moment he identified himself as the perpetrator; regardless, he was certainly an egomaniac who viewed himself as heir to the Space Race pioneers he had grown up admiring. In a bizarre attempt at forging a historical parallel between himself and his heroes, he chose the place and day of birth of the first man to set foot on the Moon, catapulting a tiny town to the front of newspapers worldwide.</p>
  <p>Haywire became the subject of a national manhunt, a precursor to the kill orders of today. Whatever bridges he may have wanted to build between worlds, he began by burning them instead. </p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>
<em>Twilight of the Dawn: The End of the Golden Age of Capes</em> (2005), by Maurice Goodwin</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote><p>
    <em>“Inevitably it was a national crisis. Look at Cuba, back in the 60s, they were one hundred, two hundred miles away and it was a crisis. In ‘87 we had missiles in Ohio and no intelligence on the other side like we had with the Soviets. Of course it was a crisis.”</em>
  </p><ul>
<li>Jeremy Cole, Department of Defense (Bet)</li>
</ul>
<p>
    <em>“It was a completely unprecedented situation. We had no idea how to react except to go, ‘Hell if we’ll roll over for you.’”</em>
  </p><ul>
<li>Christopher Westerman, Department of Defense (Aleph)</li>
</ul>
<p>I like to begin any class on Interdimensional Relations with these two quotes. One fascinating aspect of the Aleph-Bet split is that it allows us to see how America relates to itself. Faced with its mirror image, the America of the Cold War judged itself an enemy.</p>
<p>For those of us who grew up on Bet, it’s easy to argue that this was rational paranoia. We, after all (at least those of my generation) remembered the arrival of Scion and the emergence of superpowers; moreover, the anxiety of Haywire’s terrorism cannot be separated from the paranoia gripping the nation over the series of spree killings later credited to the Slaughterhouse Nine. </p>
<p>But if the nuclear standoff of those early days was all due to Bet’s fear of a new earth-shaking revelation, why Aleph’s response? From their initial perspective, they were greeted not by monsters, but by a near-identical world where Ronald Reagan still led the U.S. and <em>Back to the Future</em> had been a box office hit two years prior. In many ways, Aleph was a crystalized version of Bet five years prior, before the fascinating new hope of superheroes arrived. Their reaction was established government policy, and so, I would argue, was ours.</p></blockquote><ul>
<li>
<em>A War Within Us</em>, blog post by Peter Ortega</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>The resulting standoff was in many ways paradoxical, with both sides simultaneously knowing too much and too little about the manpower and nuclear capabilities of the other. While initial strategies on both sides were made assuming identical resources, stray radio and television transmissions began to paint a different story. Media speculation on Earth Bet ran towards theories concerning potential intervention by Scion, which was quickly picked up on by both the federal government and residents of nearby towns who received interfering broadcasts through the newly-created portal. As it was initially unclear how long Earth Bet had had individuals with superpowers, or ‘parahumans’, the political atmosphere quickly became panicked over the potential power mismatch between countries.</p>
  <p>(Later interviews with Bet Department of Defense staff revealed that they did not confirm Aleph’s lack of parahumans for two days, due to the paucity and obscurity of powered individuals in Bet at that time.)</p>
  <p>[...]</p>
  <p>This conflict set the stage for the thirteen years of wary relations we have experienced so far. Even after the negotiation of a truce between Americas, international tensions between both Americas and other nations in their respective dimensions rose due to the United States’s newfound monopoly on interdimensional trade. While the existence of parallel dimensions has become a background fact of life, the emergence of the two Endbringers has reignited worries of an invasion through Ohio or mass influx of refugees from Bet.</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>
<em>First Contact, First Blood?: Examining Interdimensional Tensions </em>(2000), Laurence Stokes</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>“IT HAPPENED TO ME, BUT NOT TO ME,” - JAPAN WATCHES AS BET COUNTERPART DROWNS</p>
  <p>The estimated death toll in Earth Bet’s Kyushu has reached five million and is expected to increase, three days after the Endbringer ‘Leviathan’ attacked the island.</p>
  <p>The outlook for Japan Bet is grim, and aftershocks are rapidly spreading through Japan Aleph. The prime minister issued a statement of mourning and solidarity to their Bet counterparts, but has stated his desire for life in Kyushu to continue as normal, encouraging the celebration of Culture Day to continue on November 3rd, the day the attack in Bet concluded. Howover, on the streets of Fukuoka - Kyushu’s most populous city and the center of the devastation - the atmosphere is tense. People avoid the harbor, and memorials to the dead have been set up throughout the city, despite official discouragement from the city.</p>
  <p>Awareness of the depth of the devastation and the rising death toll is causing uncertainty and fear in many citizens.</p>
  <p>“They say that everyone over the age of seventeen has a counterpart in the other world,” says Jiro Shimada. “I’m fifty-four and I’ve lived in Fukuoka since I was a child. There, I am almost certainly dead. It feels like waking up from a nightmare, knowing that something terrible has happened to me - but then I look at the news and remember, oh, that did happen. It happened to me, but not to me.”</p>
  <p>“I tried to forget that [Bet] existed,” Hideo Wakabayashi says. “Whenever I hear news from it, it frightens me. But I can’t forget this, and that frightens me more. It’s too close to home.”</p>
  <p>Other citizens argue that Japan should send relief funds to its Bet counterpart.</p>
  <p>“These people are our neighbors and family, or even us,” said Chikako Ida, a student at Kyushu Institute of Design. “We shouldn’t pretend it didn’t happen, and it is wrong to act like the refugees in Bet are frightening. What happened to them is terrifying, but we are safe, and have a duty to help.”</p>
  <p>Jun Fuguda agrees. “I know there are trade restrictions, but for a charitable cause, they should be lifted. We know that Earth Bet exists, and we can’t leave them to suffer. What else can we do with this portal but help?”</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>Wall Street Journal, November 6th, 1999</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>CROSS-DIMENSIONAL COLLABORATION? - Hollywood talks are heating up for a possible interdimensional crossover featuring two (yes, count ‘em!) Brad Pitts. This wouldn’t be the first Bet-Aleph co-production (<em>Confinement</em> and <em>Fifteen Letters </em>share that title, releasing in 1998) but it might just be the first to involve physical interaction between stars from different universes. The expense of interdimensional travel is legendary, but we think getting all that sex appeal in one is worth it!</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>
<em>PEOPLE</em> magazine, February 2000</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>ALEPH SHUTS DOWN TRADE - Following the wave of terror attacks that have spread across Europe in the wake of the appearance of the third Endbringer, Earth Aleph has indefinitely shut down physical trade. Officials from the Aleph U.S. Department of Commerce say that this is intended to be a temporary measure until details of the extent and method of dispersal of the mental contagion have been ascertained.</p>
  <p>Critics from Earth Aleph, however, argue their exports are being unfairly affected and that this is posturing from Aleph’s United States to remind both dimensions of their control of interdimensional traffic.</p>
  <p>Media transfer between Bet and Aleph through the internet, television, and radio will continue uninterrupted.</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>Wall Street Journal, March 2003</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>I visit my childhood home on maps. I have a road atlas that my parents left behind in my car by mistake, now one of my most treasured possessions, and I have a small collection of outdated travel guides I’ve found in used-book stores. But mostly - like the rest of us - I’ve gone digital.</p>
  <p>Loading websites hosted in Aleph still takes dial-up time. I doodle in a notebook while street view painfully resolves, one pixel at a time. My childhood home, built in 1985, is not visible in this version of Corner Brook, but the house down the street (built sometime in the seventies) is. I’ve never been able to determine if there’s a rhyme or reason to the minute differences between our dimensions pre-contact. It’s a whole field of study, I’m told. I wouldn’t know - I don’t even know how to tell which buildings were never built and which have simply been demolished in the intervening decades. With all but the highest peaks of Newfoundland underwater, the streets of my childhood only exist in my memories - unless they exist in Aleph.</p>
  <p>Officially, I am not counted among the twenty-five thousand residents of Newfoundland and Labrador displaced by Leviathan. In 2005, I was just beginning summer term at Mount Allison University. The university waived my housing fees for summer; in September, I moved in with a friend. I was never homeless. I never slept in a shelter. I had been planning my whole life to leave.</p>
  <p>My distance meant my survival, but it also meant a unique kind of pain. </p>
  <p>I am old enough to remember a time before Endbringers, something my children will never know. In the first months after Leviathan’s attack, I often forgot it had even happened. It was entirely unreal. I don’t know how many times I thought about calling my parents as I walked home, only to remember their deaths like a missed step.</p>
  <p>I never forgot finding the maps of Aleph. They were proof that mankind has one last safe place. They were proof that my childhood was real, something to point to and say: I used to live here.</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>excerpt from <em>What the Living Do</em> by Sarah DeMont</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>ENDBRINGER REACHES ALEPH; 35 PRESUMED DEAD - 35 people are missing or dead in Madison, Wisconsin following yesterday’s attack by the Endbringer ‘Simurgh’ on the city’s Bet counterpart. The Endbringer utilized remnants of the device used to create the first and only permanent portal in Wapakoneta, Ohio, to access Earth Aleph once more, causing portions of two apartment buildings to fall through into Earth Bet.</p>
  <p>“This is unprecedented behavior,” said Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown of the Parahuman Response Team. “We have retrieved and destroyed all remaining pieces of Professor Haywire’s technology that were not destroyed by Scion during the battle. We want to reassure citizens of both Bet and Aleph that there are no other known ways of creating cross-dimensional portals and that the portals created in Madison last afternoon dissipated and show no signs of re-emergence. There is no need to worry about contamination between dimensions.”</p>
  <p>President Bennett stated this morning that he was “unimpressed,” by the PRT’s response. “We on Aleph have devoted considerable resources to safeguarding our portal and the integrity of our dimension. Why did the PRT retain these devices, knowing the security risk they posed?”</p>
  <p>His opinion was echoed in Madison, where mourners have taken to the streets despite a forecast of snow and ice.</p>
  <p>“If this is what Bet thinks is acceptable, then we don’t have the same definition of okay,” said Crystina Bryant. “How can we ever feel safe in our homes again? It’s like we’re two different species.”</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>Associated Press, December 23rd, 2009</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Traditional political science has been restricted by the inability to have true treatment and control groups. Direct equivalences between political situations are difficult to draw, due to the high number of confounding variables<sup>14</sup>. However, due to the advent of interdimensional communication, there has been growing interest in comparing and contrasting our political situation on Earth Aleph with Earth Bet, which proponents argue has the potential to reduce<sup>7</sup> the effect of cultural differences between comparison groups<sup>24</sup>. Prior work has highlighted the criticality of performing this work now<sup>8</sup>, following the emergence of Endbringers<sup>11</sup> and other major geopolitical shifts<sup>3</sup>.</p>
  <p>However, we argue that this cultural divergence has already completed, and was in fact irreconcilable only a few years post-historical divergence, before first contact was made. Earth Aleph cannot be seen as a baseline or default; rather, Earth Bet has created its own distinct cultural environment. As parahuman populations rise on Earth Bet, we predict this cultural divergence will become a true cultural incompatibility that could lead to serious repercussions in international trade if not anticipated.</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>
<em>It Makes No Difference Abroad: Examining the Aleph-Bet Divergence in International Relations</em> by Sayid, S.<sup>1</sup>, Hobnell, M.<sup>1</sup>, Graham, A.<sup>2</sup>, &amp; Hoffman, R.<sup>2</sup>
</li>
</ul>
<p><sup>1</sup> Columbia University, Department of Political Science (Aleph); <sup>2</sup> Columbia University, Department of Political Science (Bet)</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>SECOND PORTAL TO BET OPENED - Following a battle with an unidentified parahuman force in Brockton Bay, a new portal between Earth Bet and Earth Aleph was opened through an accidental combination of parahuman powers, as confirmed by the authorities of Bet’s Brockton Bay. The portal remained open for less than twenty minutes, but not before unidentified individuals believed to be involved parahumans passed through. Military forces were dispatched to the area, but no suspects have been apprehended. </p>
  <p>The mayor of Brockton Bay, Stephanie Snyder, has urged citizens to remain “cautious, but calm.” In a speech Tuesday morning, she addressed concerns that the alleged parahumans may have been associated with the burgeoning criminal population in Bet’s Brockton Bay, saying that “local and state police, the military, and the National Guard are all maintaining a presence in the city and remaining on alert for any alien individuals, but we have had no reports of parahuman-involved violence. We are in constant communication with the officials in Earth Bet, and we are actively cooperating to make this difficult situation as easy as possible for all of us. If you see suspicious activity you suspect to be related to parahuman activity, please contact the city’s hotline. There is currently no reason to suspect a recurrence of this incident.”</p>
  <p>Controversially, Representative Kate McCarthy has advocated to open negotiations with Bet for a permanent portal installation similar to Wapakoneta. Senator and presidential hopeful Ramon Alvarez of New York voiced his disagreement and his support for hardline anti-portal measures, saying that, “We are not prepared to do business in a city overrun by superpowered criminals. We are especially not prepared for the access to our home dimension this portal gives to Bet’s so-called S-class threats. A look at flood level tables will tell you that this portal would have been underwater during Leviathan’s attack on the Bet Brockton Bay. What will we do if he attacks again? What will we do if the Simurgh attacks and opens another portal like she did in Madison? We have to anticipate the worst.”</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>The Bay Bulletin, June 22nd, 2011</li>
</ul>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>PORTAL TO BET CLOSED PERMANENTLY - After two months of negotiation, the parahuman Valkyrie permanently deactivated the portal in Wapakoneta, closing Aleph off from Bet permanently.</p>
  <p>[...]</p>
  <p>Wapakoneta emerged unscathed from the unprecedented interdimensional attack by the parahuman Scion, but has been overwhelmed by an influx of Bet refugees over the past month, leading to unrest among native residents. The sentiment was echoed by residents of Brockton Bay and the surrounding area, where a portal from Bet was briefly opened in 2011.</p>
  <p>“How can we guarantee that they won’t reopen that portal?” asked one anonymous resident. “How do we know parahumans haven’t already come through from Bet?”</p>
  <p>Another said, “Our first priority should be refugees from our own dimension. We have too much rebuilding to do worldwide to focus on handholding Bet residents who forced their way here.”</p>
  <p>These attitudes have sparked a humanitarian movement to outlaw discrimination based on universe of origin, which has been met with support from the ACLU and the Association of Bet Refugees (ABR), an organization that represents residents of refugee camps throughout Ohio as they navigate the citizenship transfer process.</p>
  <p>“Paranoia about refugees is standard xenophobia, exacerbated by how there is no practical way to deport people across dimensions without keeping the portal open and increasing the risk of a serious inter-dimensional conflict over access to our world. The asylum seekers already here are being detained and screened for corona pollentia in addition to mundane illnesses. The bigger threat is parahumans outside of Aleph,” said Harsh Sharma, a law professor at Ohio State University and ABR liaison. “Both previous portals were opened from Bet’s side. We can’t know we’re safe, now that we know that there are dozens of universes out there. We’re sealed off, sure - for now.”</p>
</blockquote><ul>
<li>The Columbus Dispatch, December 11th, 2013</li>
</ul>
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